by Lisa Lowell
“You never went into Paget's thoughts without permission,” Owailion supplied, still not looking away from the fire. “Your honor made you vulnerable to her deception, even before you touched the Heart Stone.”
Defeated and beyond words, Vamilion sat down again with a thump. “Why are you telling me this now, here, where ….where I cannot escape your toxic words?”
Owailion tugged a tuft of grass from the ground and fed it to the fire, although it didn't need to burn anything more than his magic. “I have always wanted you to go to your true mate. You know that. I want that because you will both be stronger for it.”
“What's it to you?” Vamilion muttered bitterly. “You and magic have ruined every grain of happiness I ever had.”
Owailion plucked up a shapeless glob of metal he had dropped earlier in the grass and began playing with it like it was clay, shaping wondrous little miniature dragons and monsters every time he closed his hand over the mass. His mindless creating might be to distract Vamilion, but it failed. Owailion's answer was far more important. “I did it because your grain of anger will dislodge a pebble, which will nudge a rock that will launch an avalanche of magic that will block evil from invading for another five hundred years. Because you are the only person in the world I can call my friend. Because you deserve to be happy if anyone does.”
Happy? The word seemed beyond recognition. Vamilion didn't feel capable of happiness. He would rather battle a thousand invading sorcerers than to talk to Paget or Gailin at that moment. He might start walking and see where he ended up before he had a single word to give to either woman.
Instead he spoke again to stop his mind from fixating. “So you made me angry enough to snap the ley lines,” he managed to say, finally recognizing Owailion's motives for letting Gailin be manipulated by the hunter. “Is there any way you can make me sad enough to bury every sorcerer in the world?”
“No,” Owailion admitted regretfully. “But I can make you happy enough to fight them.”
Vamilion sighed. The King of Creating still wanted him to go look Gailin in the eye and forget about Paget forever. “No,” he finally decided. “I will have to confront Paget first. And you will have to send me there if you want it to happen in the next two months, because it will take me that long to walk off this plain. Send me to a mountain and I'll do it.”
Chapter 16 – Confrontation
Gailin found Drake in the bed she had abandoned months ago, lying deathly pale. She could not imagine how she could deal with the remains of her husband and still go on Seeking like she felt compelled to do. She wanted to move on, finding other Talismans, helping people all across the Land. The recent destruction must have caused a myriad of injuries that would need her help, but she didn't know how to uphold both her responsibilities as a Wise One and a wife. Technically, Drake was still alive and she had an obligation to him. What could she do?
She looked around the empty cabin and only then realized that Grandma's bed was gone, along with its former occupant. Where had Vamilion taken her grandmother? Where would she be? He would have found some way to take care of her, even if he was battling Owailion and all the sorcerers in the world. He kept his promises, of that she was sure. Where would he have taken her grandmother? Gailin deliberately took out her book and wrote an urgent question to Vamilion. She didn't want to interrupt him intentionally, and she doubted his dealings with Owailion had resolved themselves so quickly, but she needed to know her grandmother was safe and find someplace for Drake.
An idea occurred to her even as she wrote her question and then closed the book. Could she find her grandmother herself? She sat at her abandoned table to think it out and concentrate. She had been given the candle that provided instant travel but no way to find where she wanted to go. She had been drawn to the unknown location in the middle of the plains because Vamilion had called her. Could she use that same method to find her grandmother? Grandma's name, she knew. She could go to Grandma with the candle if she knew where to find her. Carefully, Gailin concentrated and conjured herself a map.
Vamilion's map of the world, overlain with Drake's ley lines appeared on the table before her. She did not remember it herself precisely, but the map she had found in her husband's memory had become part of the magic in her mind and created itself flawlessly on the paper that spread before her. She recognized pieces of it from her limited travel and was able to label some things from what she knew of maps in general. This one, however, had few markings for actual human habitation and no words at all. It had originally been a geological map and then Drake had marked the ley lines and Wise One palaces over the top so she would have to use what she already knew.
She found where her home village must lay, on the Don River, halfway between the Vamilion Mountains and the southern end of the Great Chain. Drake and she had walked northwest onto the plains and she traced that direction from her village with her finger. Somewhere to the northwest on a second river and near the mountains she had married Drake in the town of Meeting, which was not noted on the map. Then they had passed into the mountains going to the base of a huge lake where they found the Apothecary. Then they wove their way west until they came to her palace in the mountains. It was marked with a diamond shape, one like fifteen others all around the map. A smile came to her face as she set her finger there. One day she would return, make the shattered, avalanche-blasted cabin disappear and return to open the doors of that palace, but not today. If she were in the Great Chain then the other line of mountains in the south must be the Vamilion Mountains. He had been named after that range…or it could be the other way around. However, only one Wise One palace had been built in those mountains and that would be Vamilion's home.
He would have taken Grandma there, she was sure. Gailin rose from the table and stepped outside as if she could see directly there. The day was still young and would be even younger there. Could she go to a place she had not seen or was not called? Experimenting for the first time with her limits, Gailin reached her mind toward the west to seek her grandmother's dreams. The old woman's thoughts would be quiet and peaceful, tired and unclear. At first Gailin struggled with focusing her mind's eye, getting tangled in the minds of others along the way. There were many villages along the western branch of the Don and every one of them had emergencies and urgent healing needed due to the geologic upheaval of the day before. She would have to come back this way and knew that compulsions to go help lined up as she traveled down the river and along the mountains. But she must settle Drake first.
Finally, in the mind's eye of one traveler she encountered she saw Vamilion's palace at last. He wasn't even aware of her invasion as he hiked down a lonely road into a town at the base of the mountains. The graceful edifice she saw through his vision had been cut into the mountain itself, white and stunning, with spires and intricate pointed arches as a recurring theme in its architecture. The black slate roofs topped with blood red banners towered over the trees and village below. The iron gates and intricate gardens fascinated her. Cinder pathways through the gardens crunched under the traveler's feet. Like her, this wanderer also could not take his eyes off the glittering walls. He too felt her awe of Vamilion, home of the Mountain King.
Gailin pulled her mind back into her humble cabin and considered what she would do now. She had a visual to use if she traveled by candle, but dare she go to Vamilion's palace? Paget was there watching over Grandma. Would she know Gailin for who and what she was? Would Vamilion's wife be willing to take another invalid? Well, it didn't matter. Gailin had too much to do and taking Drake with her would not be possible any more than leaving him here to starve in an empty cabin. She had to do it and face the consequences later.
“Neeorm,” Gailin said with authority, wondering if he had the capability to follow instructions with his empty mind. “Wake up.”
Drake's eyes opened, though they appeared cloudy and he didn't turn to look at her. “Neeorm, sit up,” she commanded.
In an eerie move, the almost
-dead sat up in the bed where Owailion had dropped him. Gailin smiled at what she could do to him now, and while she thought of torturing the sorcerer for what he had done to her, she didn't have time and the Heart Stone had other dealings with her. Drake still wore only his night clothes so she conjured boots and britches onto him before ordering him out of bed and to follow her outside. A wicked part of her hoped he recognized how name magic manipulated him but it didn't matter now. She took him by the arm, lifted her candle high and concentrated on the path to Vamilion's palace. Then she stepped toward where the light led her.
The sun was higher here, barely noon, and Gailin began walking down the cinder path, seeing the spires and sheer walls through the trees for herself. However, Drake didn't follow her walking and instead fell on his face before she remembered she would need to give him every instruction. “Neeorm, stand up and follow me,” she commanded. The humiliation would be horrible for a man like Drake, but she wouldn't torment him any more than this. She walked him through glorious gardens and past ponds and the park-like setting. It was a pleasant place that he wouldn't be able to appreciate and that was good enough.
When Gailin faced the polished wood door, shining with redwood stain to a high gloss, she knew now how difficult this was going to be for her as well. Gailin took a steadying breath. She was about to meet Paget, the woman she would eventually supplant in Vamilion's heart. Gailin did not want this to be a confrontation but it was doomed to be awkward at the least if Paget knew who she was. And who was she? She could never use the name Gailin again. She had to use another name. And the instant she thought of this, she knew the name she would use; her grandmother's. It was fitting. She reached out and knocked as loudly as she could.
The door, all two stories of it opened after only a moment and much to her surprise a man answered the door. “Good afternoon,” he said politely. “How may I help you?”
“I've come to see my grandmother. I'm…” Abruptly she found herself blocked. She couldn't even lie about her name? For one flustered moment Gailin almost panicked. Then she recalled how Vamilion had introduced himself to her. “You may call me Honiea. I am the Queen of Healing.”
The gentleman who opened the door looked at her with suddenly wide eyes and then bowed low to her, opened both doors and motioned for her to come in. “I am Goren, the Doorkeeper of Vamilion. You are most welcome,” he intoned, almost reverently.
Gailin had to order Neeorm through the doors into a wondrous foyer lined with velvet hangings over sheer marble walls. She gazed in fascination at crystal chandeliers and polished onyx floors. She had never imagined such a place. Her eyes were drawn to all the little niches around the walls. Each one housed a delicate sculpture of some animal or plant exquisitely crafted out of marble or some other stone. She looked at them in awe, just then realizing that Vamilion must have been their creator. He had a gift with stone, he had said and now she saw it in action. When he wasn't off fighting to save the world and cracking the earth in two, he came home for peace and worked with his hands. It was charming to her and she felt the tug of a compulsion. She could easily fall in love with this sculptor.
Goren smiled at her distraction and Gailin felt herself blushing in front of him. “I'm sorry. They're beautiful…the whole place is beautiful…but I didn't come here to…I came to see my grandmother and…and this is Neeorm. He is….broken. I need a place to put him. He cannot….I need your help with him. Is that possible?”
Goren looked severely at Drake and the door steward's visage darkened. “He is the hunter that has plagued Lord Vamilion for many years. You have mastered him then?”
“I have. He deserves death, but magic has stayed my hand. His true name is Neeorm. After all the earthquakes yesterday, there is much I must go do and I cannot watch over him and still do my duty. He is catatonic and will probably die soon, but until that time, he must be cared for. Is that possible here?”
Goren looked doubtful. “I am not a magician to be commanding him. I don't have the power to do name magic but if he is not a danger to others here…”
“He will be well here,” a woman's voice echoed down from one of the spiraling stairs above the foyer.
Gailin looked up and saw an older lady with graying black hair running in long braids down her back and deep brown eyes. The lines of time had begun pulling on her but she retained a tall dignity that Gailin could never hope to have. Even in her royal gown and standing in her palace Gailin would never hope to be as grand as Paget in Vamilion's eyes. His wife was tall and graceful, a fine match at one time for the likes of Vamilion. Her coloring, equally dark and dramatic went well with the palace she called home and Gailin felt like the intruder she was. Paget wore a fine silk dress, night blue and devoid of all decoration that all the better showed off her alabaster skin and lonely face.
Without realizing it, Gailin lowered her head to honor Vamilion's wife. “Lady Paget,” she murmured. “Thank you…for the care of my grandmother as well. The Land is new and there is no place to house such as these. One day there will be, but until then…”
“Until then, I will watch them,” Paget replied as she came down the stairs and stood in front of Gailin, looking her over. The older woman's face was hard to read, almost like Drake's, for her eyes also looked deep and emotion seemed alien to her. Gailin felt tempted to listen in on Paget's thoughts to see if she knew about the compulsion that drew Vamilion and Gailin together, but she resisted. She did not want to know if Paget approved or disapproved of her but it could hardly be comfortable to look at the other woman who would follow after you.
“My thanks. If I could see my grandmother very quickly, I will be gone,” Gailin nervously added.
Both Goren and Paget objected. “Surely you can stay for lunch at least,” suggested Goren. Perhaps they were unaware of who she really was and all the awkwardness her presence must bring through their doors.
Gailin sighed with regret as well as to ease the tension she felt. “I'm sorry, I cannot. I am the Queen of Healing and there is much that is demanding my attention. It is a compulsion…” Now Paget had to know.
Paget looked down, almost with sadness in her eyes. “I hear that word, compulsion, often. I'm sorry. I will take you to your grandmother.”
Gailin followed Paget to a door just off the foyer to where her grandmother had been warmly housed. There was a fire at a brazier with her concoction simmering over it and the room smelled deliciously of the honey in the kettle. Grandmother lay in the same rustic bed that must have come with her from the cabin. It didn't fit the fine decoration of the gold and green room with elegantly cast candlesticks but no one complained. Gailin went to Grandma's side and put her hand on her pale face, listening intently to her grandmother's thoughts and dreams. The old woman slept contentedly and was in no pain. With a bit of concentration Gailin was able to wash away the bed sores that invariably developed with time though there was nothing to prevent them.
“She'll not make it to winter,” Paget murmured from the door.
“I know,” Gailin replied, not taking her eyes off the woman she loved. “I just wanted to say goodbye. I wasn't able to do so before. I will leave you a candle. Just light it and hold it up high and I will know you need me if…when she is about to pass. Or whenever you need my help. Your husband promised to take care of her and I thank you for what you have done.”
“It is the least I could do,” Paget replied graciously. “I might not have magic, but I have served it most of my life.”
Gailin looked back at Paget at that and then smiled. “Oh, you have magic, Lady. You have love which is the strongest magic in the world. It can…it has moved mountains.”
Paget leaned wearily against the door jam, as if she had grown too tired to stand. “That was him yesterday, wasn't it? He was moving mountains. How was it?” she asked, although she obviously knew the answers.
Gailin stood and moved toward the door, for she did not want her grandmother to be tainted by the discussions of magic. “Yes, he w
as moving more than mountains, but I don't know much about how, or even why. We have not…not formally met. He still cares for you and will not break his vow to you. I respect him for that. There is much for me to learn and do in the meantime and it will be many years before I am…ready. You need not worry that I will ever take your place in his heart.”
Gailin then passed hurriedly through the door and left the room, afraid of seeing the pain in the older woman's eyes, passing beyond Paget and back into the foyer. But as she left the room, she heard Paget's parting words. “No, but I have already taken myself out of his heart.”
* * *
In the end Vamilion talked Owailion into sending him to the new Gardway island with an oath that he would confront Paget, but he wanted to be clean and rested first and somehow, after a transcontinental battle, a winter as a cairn of stones, cracking the world open and then having his body pieced back together, he wanted a bath. Besides, this conversation required some thought and stranded on the plains, with Owailion hovering over him didn't count as adequate preparation to speak about this. So he had Owailion send him in one of his instant travel spells to Gardway Island.
Uncharacteristically Owailion placed him gently right beside one of the still steaming pools and it was a good thing. Vamilion could barely stand and while everything functioned, moving still felt incredibly painful and slow, like he had aged decades into an old man. “You are one,” he muttered to himself as he stripped down and eased himself carefully into the water. The tsunamis from the season before had left mud deposits over the black lava fields and a green haze of plant life had begun, leaving the alien territory smoothed and almost like a carpet. The hot springs steamed invitingly, but after soaking there in the warm water for an hour and surveying his handiwork now that the volcanic unrest had settled, Vamilion finally realized he would have to think about Paget no matter what he did.